Mayor Eric Adams
Ed Reed/Mayoral Pictures Workplace
From the very begin, I’ve been a tech mayor, and our administration has regularly expanded our use of know-how to maintain New Yorkers safer, stronger, and extra knowledgeable. From linking our public colleges to the NYPD so we are able to reply extra quickly to any college emergency, to deploying security drones and increasing broadband to our neighbors in NYCHA, we’ve got embraced the facility and risk of recent know-how to make life higher for all New Yorkers.
However to be an inclusive and really accessible metropolis, we should even be probably the most language-friendly metropolis on the globe. This can be a international metropolis, the place you may hear tons of of languages spoken on each avenue, in each retailer, and on each stoop, and we wish to be sure that, it doesn’t matter what language you communicate, you may talk along with your metropolis and be taught concerning the providers you’re eligible for.
That’s wy, final week, I issued a directive to metropolis companies to guage how they’ll additional incorporate language applied sciences into their day-to-day interactions with the general public. Our objective is to enhance communications with all New Yorkers, together with non-English talking communities.
To begin, the town is planning to put in language apps on all city-owned good units — greater than 100,000 in whole — to make metropolis providers extra accessible to New Yorkers. We’re additionally updating the NYPD Patrol Information Coverage to permit officers to make use of translation apps whereas interacting with the general public. It will give our officers on the beat addressing New Yorkers’ issues about security and high quality of life one other software at their disposal to speak with communities along with Language Line, which has been used since 1992.
We’re additionally ensuring such a know-how can be utilized to help our households and kids. New York Metropolis Public Faculties has begun growth on “Hello,” a brand new app to assist bridge language gaps that shall be rolled out within the spring of 2026. By utilizing speech-to-text and text-to-speech interactions, Hi there will be capable of give real-time translation and interpretation within the prime 12 languages spoken by public college households.
There have been many dramatic developments in know-how lately, and we’re headed into a brand new period the place tech shall be built-in into our lives in every kind of recent methods. We wish to be sure that this know-how is applied safely and pretty, defending New Yorkers and their privateness whilst we make it simpler for New Yorkers from each nook of the globe to navigate life in our metropolis. From discovering housing and employment, to opening a small enterprise or enrolling their kids in class, language ought to by no means be a barrier to security or entry to metropolis providers.
This announcement additional builds on the work we’ve got executed to enhance service supply and make New York Metropolis authorities extra inclusive and accessible as a result of after we embrace know-how, we’re capable of ship each a part of our imaginative and prescient extra successfully — making our metropolis safer, extra inexpensive, and the perfect place to stay and lift a household.
